Bad Company Read online

  They got in Charlene’s checkout line, knowing it would move fastest. “Hey, Delice,” said Charlene, who knew everybody, “how are you all doing?”

  Delice bobbed a shoulder. “Mary’s taking it hard. Everybody else is coping. And my brother you’ve seen, I take it.”

  “Seen, and heard. He rounded up all the employees this morning and gave us one hell of an introduction to police procedure. I guess ol’ Scotty Atkins is running the investigation. Boy, he’s one cool piece of stuff, isn’t he?” Charlene wiggled her eyebrows.

  “Has been ever since high school,” Delice said. She could never resist a little gossip, and turned to Sally to explain. “Half the girls at Laramie High were trying to get into his jeans. The other half already had. The basketball coach said he had a fifteen-inch vertical jump, and from what I heard, he was even better horizontal. But he doesn’t let on much, does he?”

  Charlene grinned. “Makes you want to see what you could do to loosen up his tongue.”

  Hmm.

  “I don’t know as anybody’s managed that since he got back in town,” Delice said, explaining to Sally, “He went off to police academy after college, worked for the Department of Criminal Investigations in Casper, and married some girl from up there. They got divorced last year and he came back here to work for the Sheriff’s Department. From what I hear, he does nothing these days but work out and eat bullets for breakfast. He’s a real cop’s cop.”

  Right on cue, Scotty Atkins turned and looked straight at them. So he was the kind of man who had a sixth sense about when women were discussing his, er, attributes. Sally looked away, not quite fast enough.

  “I guess it’ll be a regular policeman’s ball around here. Dickie made it clear that we’d be seeing all we cared to of him too,” Charlene told Delice. “He said we should all try to remember and tell them anything we could think of about this place, or Monette, or yesterday, or the rodeo, or the last time we had the creepin’ heebiejeebies, anything that might help them find the killer. Then they started in with everybody who worked yesterday. Monette went off duty at ten, and I guess she was found by some hikers at five or so.”

  Five-seventeen. Sally knew precisely. Hawk had mentioned the time as he gave the dispatcher directions. But the police had chosen not to release the identities of the hikers who’d made the horrid discovery.

  “Anyhow,” said Charlene, bagging their purchases and making change, “they asked everybody a whole bunch of questions, and then when they were done, asked all the same questions all over again in slightly different ways, five or six more times each. Then they said they’d want fingerprints, and we all gave them. We’re only just now getting back to normal.”

  “Sounds like you’re all cooperating,” Sally said, wondering about Adolph the produce clerk. Probably he wasn’t the only person in the store, or in town, who wouldn’t be telling the police everything he knew about Monette Bandy.

  “Of course we’re cooperating!” said Charlene. “Nobody here wants to be next. If this guy’s got some kind of thing for supermarket checkers, we want him found, and now!”

  Sally had to ask. “So what do her friends think, Charlene? Who could have done such a thing?”

  Pity flashed across the checker’s face. “Her friends? Now who would that be, I wonder? You could say that we all knew her, but I wouldn’t call anybody at the store exactly a friend of hers. It’s such a shame. Maybe if somebody here had been looking out after her, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Maybe,” said Delice. “I guess there’s a lot of that feeling going around. I know there’s a lot of us who’d like to see the guy who did it fry in hell.” Sally and Charlene nodded hard.

  As they wheeled their groceries out to Delice’s Ford Explorer, Sally asked, “Do you think anybody could have done something to prevent this happening to Monette?”

  Delice took her time answering. “I’ve never been a fan of second guesses. Even if I were, I’d say no. Monette was young, and in some strange ways incredibly naive. Maybe Dickie and Mary could have done more, but they really did try. Monette blew them off. She was hell-bent, and the world’s too full of devils. Whatever made her that way started a long time before she showed up here.”

  Sally thought about that. “You know, Dee, it doesn’t really matter what kind of demons were driving her. She didn’t deserve to die that way. She shouldn’t just be thrown away because everybody’s got places to go and things to do. Her death has to mean something.” And we’ll never know what it means until we know what she did, and why she did it, Sally told herself.

  Delice said nothing. But as they drove down Third Street, past the Loose Caboose bar and package store, Delice gasped, swerved, and nearly hit the car in the on-coming lane.

  “What the hell!” Sally shouted, reaching over to grab the wheel. “Are you having a heart attack or something?”

  “No! Goddamn it, take your hands off the wheel. I’m fine,” shouted Delice, pulling off the road into a vacant dirt lot. “Look over there, at the drive-up window of the Loose Caboose.”

  Sally looked. All she saw was a beat and dusty old Dodge truck with Wyoming plates, a man with a cowboy hat leaning out the driver’s window as the liquor store clerk handed over a twelve-pack of Old Milwaukee and a bottle in a brown paper bag.

  All Wyomingites knew that the state’s license plates began with a number that indicated the county in which the vehicle had been registered. Real license plate cognoscenti knew which numbers stood for which county. The state had twenty-three counties, and Sally, no connoisseur, knew only about five by number. “What’s county twenty?” she asked, knowing that Delice, a Wyoming native and lover of the state’s history and geography, would have the answer.

  “That’s Weston County. Newcastle’s the county seat. Guess we were speakin’ of the devil. That there truck,” she said, taking a deep breath and glaring hard, “is being driven by none other than Pettibone Bandy. And it looks like the son of a bitch is stocking up for a party.”

  Chapter 5

  Differences of Opinion

  So this was what it was like for the astronauts at liftoff. Before Sally had time to do more than squeak, Delice had peeled out across four lanes of traffic, fishtailed into the Loose Caboose parking lot, and screamed to a rubber-burning halt with the Explorer pointed at an angle, between the exit of the drive-up and the entrance to the street.

  The driver’s door of the Chevy flew open, and Bone Bandy popped out, face red as a beefsteak tomato. Sally’s first thought: rabies. He was, it seemed, mad enough to be literally foaming at the mouth. But then, as she caught sight of the big bulge in his cheek, she realized why there was a big stringy gob of saliva hanging out of the side of his mouth. Like so many Wyoming men, Bone was a user of smokeless tobacco. He must have been getting ready to spit when Delice pulled in front of him, and ended up with his wad all over his face.

  He was cussing some, too, damning Delice in ways that made Sally’s own use of questionable language look like A Child’s Garden of Verses. The words he was using, in the particular combination in which he was using them, brought back strong memories of dozens of guys like him, and reminded her why she’d quit making her living singing in bars.

  Way back then, nothing had mattered more than the music. In return for the chance to get paid for singing, for doing something she’d have been doing anyway, she’d logged thousands of hard miles of road, spent way too many nights on rump-sprung mattresses in cheap motels, dealt with too many men whose intentions were not good. Five years of following the music and the money all over the Rockies had given her a substantially more pessimistic view of human nature in general, and of the character of the average American male in particular.

  Sally had never really known Bone Bandy, but she’d known who he was, having encountered him in the Gallery bar, twenty long years ago. The first time he’d come in with a drilling crew working out by Elk Mountain, a bunch who’d drawn her attention because none of them had bothered to clean
up after work, but come straight to town to party on a Friday night. Sally had been sitting at a table with Delice, Mary, and, now that she recalled it, Mary’s sister, Tanya Nagy, minding their own business but getting fairly happy at the hour of the same name. Bone and his friends had started sending drinks over to their table. Delice had wanted to send them back, but Tanya had said she never looked a free drink in the mouth, and then Delice had insisted that it was a better policy never to take a free drink from a horse’s ass.

  Delice, Sally, and Mary had left at the end of happy hour. Tanya had stayed.

  No second-guessing that one.

  Now Bone was leaning in the driver’s window of the Explorer, wiping the dark brown clump of spit away with the back of one hand and grabbing Delice’s shirt with the other. “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked, red-rimmed blue eyes squinting back and forth between Delice and Sally in a hard flickering glance that made Sally hope that he wasn’t packing.

  Delice was too furious to be scared. “Surprised to see you here so quick, Bone,” she said, all frost. “I realize it’s customary to notify the next of kin in case of death, but I’d never have believed they’d find you in whatever rat burrow you’re living in now, let alone that you’d come. Picking up a little something to contribute to the wake?”

  Bone actually laughed. “Contribute? To a wake for Monette? I don’t know why in holy hell I should. My darling daughter let me know just last week, she didn’t need a goddamn thing from her old man,” he said, leaning in the truck window and spitting a stream of dark juice onto Delice’s left boot. “Called her up to tell her I was between jobs and comin’ in for the rodeo, and she told me—let’s see, what were her exact words—that she was in ‘tall cotton,’ and I better not come around wanting a loan or a place to crash, and I should just stay the fuck away. Kids these days got no respect.”

  Delice was obviously using every ounce of self-control she possessed not to look down at her gooked-up Charlie Dunn, and instead to stare Bone down. “So what’d you do, decide to grab her and teach her some respect, like you did with Tanya?”

  For a very long moment Bone glared at Delice, saying nothing. And then, in a low, flat voice, he said, “Maybe somebody oughta teach you a little respect, Delice. You’ve got a habit of getting up on your high horse and pissing people off, and that’s the kind of thing that can put people in mind to learn you a lesson. I know two or three guys who’ve given it some thought, over the years.” He moved closer, dribbling more tobacco juice down his chin, twisting his fist in Delice’s shirt and pulling her face close. “Might be they’re in town and in an educatin’ mood.”

  Sally was very unhappy with the trend of the conversation. She glanced at the glove compartment. Delice was a staunch Second Amendment person who believed that antique weapons were a form of poetry, and who kept a couple of long-barrel Colt .45s, locked and loaded, by the cash registers in her restaurants, just in case there was a need for poetic justice. Sally felt certain that Delice would also have a gun in her truck. Sally could see her hand inching toward the glove box, could visualize Delice taking the gun out and pointing it at Bone, just to give him the hint that it was time to go away. To Sally, that seemed like a precipitous choice.

  There was a large, heavy, chrome-plated flashlight mounted on a bracket on the roof of the Explorer, just over the passenger’s door. Sally snapped the flashlight out of the holder, brandished it in what she hoped was an intimidating manner. “That’ll be enough!” she commanded in an arrogant voice she’d practiced, in case she ever had to deliver a lecture at Heidelberg, or some university where they had professors who specialized in bullying. “Delice, we’ve got to get back to Mary and Dickie’s. Bone, if you like your knuckles the way they are, you’d better let go of Delice’s shirt, right now.”

  Bone looked at Sally as if seeing her clearly for the first time. “Well, I’ll be. Is that the famous washed-up guitar whore, Mustang Sally Alder, wavin’ a flashlight around in there? I believe that it is. Just terrifying, Mustang. ’Course, just lookin’ at you two is all that.” He whistled between his teeth. “Ain’t you girls worried that both of you ridin’ in this truck will be so much ugly it’ll crack the windshield?”

  But he let go of Delice and backed off. Score one for Fraulein Dr. Professor Alder.

  Delice gave him a narrow-eyed scowl. “I’ll let Dickie know you’re in town, Bone. I expect he’ll be wanting to have a word with you.”

  He was climbing back in his pickup but stopped, one leg still hanging out, and leaned out of the truck. “Don’t fuck with me, girls,” he said, his face a blank. “You really don’t wanna fuck with me.”

  “Don’t mess with us!” Sally found herself yelling back, shaking the flashlight for emphasis, even as it occurred to her that this was the kind of conversation that ended up in the Laramie newspaper. One minute people were talking, and the next somebody was whacking somebody with a flashlight. It didn’t take much to get in the Boomerang police report; Sally had once chuckled over the story of a man who filed a complaint that he’d been out with some friends, drinking on the prairie, and somebody had punched his truck. Then again, with damn near everyone in the state carrying firearms, it didn’t take a whole lot for a routine truck punching to turn into deadlier stuff.

  “Come on, Delice,” she said, hoping Delice wouldn’t decide to get out and try to beat up Bone Bandy. “Let’s leave him to Dickie.” She put the flashlight back up in the bracket.

  Delice fumed all the way back to Dickie and Mary’s, muttering about how Bone didn’t scare her, about how curious it was that he happened to be in town just now, about what kinds of rotten business he’d done or was doing.

  Sally only half listened. Of all the things that Bone Bandy had said in that short, unfortunate exchange, she’d gotten hung up on only one.

  What had Monette meant when she said she was “in tall cotton”?

  She could have been referring to her promotion. Checkers made good money, more than Monette could have expected to make in any other job. Bone had evidently told her he was unemployed. In what they called “the Oilpatch,” layoffs were like flat tires—never convenient, but something you came to expect on a rocky road. Maybe Monette had just been lording it over her dear old deadbeat dad. Did Bone know any more about it?

  Or maybe it was something else. Did Monette think she’d finally caught a rich boyfriend? Sally knew that plenty of rodeo cowboys spent it when they had it. Sure, some of them were God-fearing Christian lads who lifted weights and toted along tiny house trailers instead of paying motel bills, and saved every penny they earned, knowing that they were making their living courting spinal injury. But lots of them were young enough to want to raise hell, and old enough to do it. They rolled along and rode for the purse every night, never knowing whether a saddle bronc would buck them into a traction bed in some dusty cowtown clinic, or open the door to a fine steak dinner or new tires for the pickup or just a wild night in a strange place.

  If Monette had been willing to settle for the two pathetic specimens Sally had seen in the Lifeway checkout line, what would she have thought if some tight-butt bull-riding boy had paid one second’s worth of attention to her?

  Over the years Sally had seen her share of relatively sane, judicious, intelligent women lose their marbles over the swagger between the hat and the boots. Take Delice, for example. There had been a time when Sally and Delice had gone through their share of the eligible men of Laramie (and in truth, some who weren’t legally eligible), but they’d agreed on many a penitent Monday morning that at least they weren’t marrying the fools. And then Delice had suddenly gone crazy and ended up hitched to, of all people, Walker Davis, a half-bright piece of range-fed beefcake whose annual income, when he was having his best years as a team roper, almost approached that of, well, a supermarket checker. Most times Walker kept it together stretching fences and herding cows and getting part of his wages in room and board in somebody’s bunkhouse, and, of course,
sponging off besotted females like Delice. When Walker had finally lived up to his name and strolled off into the sunset with a blond barrel racer from Belle Fourche, Delice had little Jerry Jeff Walker Davis to remember him by. JJ was every bit as handsome as his big gray-eyed daddy had been, and already starting to wreak havoc with the ladies.

  If even somebody as hardheaded as Delice could fall victim to cowboy sex voodoo, what of a bleeding bag of need like Monette?

  Sally would have to get Delice’s expert opinion on the matter, but by now they were pulling up in front of Dickie and Mary’s, and the front door of the house was open. They could hear the argument all the way out in the yard. Delice slammed the truck into the driveway, turned off the engine, grabbed the watermelon, and rushed into the house, with Sally hard on her heels, toting grocery bags.

  “I don’t know why you want to go and have some big public memorial thing for some girl who never amounted to anything, who nobody liked, who wasn’t even from here,” Nattie was saying. “It wasn’t like she was your daughter or something. Your sister made her bed a long time ago, when she went off with Bone Bandy. Have a little consideration for those of us who are still trying to make a living. Jubilee Days only comes around once a year. Besides, I’d have thought you’d rather have a quiet family service. It’s so much more tasteful,” Nattie added.

  Nattie Langham talking about tastefulness was about as plausible as Bill Gates talking about business competition. Sally looked at Delice to see if she was appreciating the irony, but Delice was in no mood for either appreciation or irony. Her encounter with Bone had gotten her black powder primed, and Nattie had lit the fuse.

  “Shut the hell up, Nattie,” Delice hissed between her teeth. “When we want advice from you on good taste, we’ll stop gagging and ask for it. What’s going on here?”